OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Implicit Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely used deep learning models that learn meaningful representations from graph-structured data. Due to the finite nature of the underlying recurrent structure, current GNN methods may struggle to capture long-range dependencies in underlying graphs. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a graph learning framework, called Implicit Graph Neural Networks (IGNN), where predictions are based on the solution of a fixed-point equilibrium equation involving implicitly defined "state" vectors. We use the Perron-Frobenius theory to derive sufficient conditions that ensure well-posedness of the framework. Leveraging implicit differentiation, we derive a tractable projected gradient descent method to train the framework. Experiments on a comprehensive range of tasks show that IGNNs consistently capture long-range dependencies and outperform the state-of-the-art GNN models.
DANCE: Differentiable Accelerator/Network Co-Exploration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

To cope with the ever-increasing computational demand of the DNN execution, recent neural architecture search (NAS) algorithms consider hardware cost metrics into account, such as GPU latency. To further pursue a fast, efficient execution, DNN-specialized hardware accelerators are being designed for multiple purposes, which far-exceeds the efficiency of the GPUs. However, those hardware-related metrics have been proven to exhibit non-linear relationships with the network architectures. Therefore it became a chicken-and-egg problem to optimize the network against the accelerator, or to optimize the accelerator against the network. In such circumstances, this work presents DANCE, a differentiable approach towards the co-exploration of the hardware accelerator and network architecture design. At the heart of DANCE is a differentiable evaluator network. By modeling the hardware evaluation software with a neural network, the relation between the accelerator architecture and the hardware metrics becomes differentiable, allowing the search to be performed with backpropagation. Compared to the naive existing approaches, our method performs co-exploration in a significantly shorter time, while achieving superior accuracy and hardware cost metrics.
EdinburghNLP at WNUT-2020 Task 2: Leveraging Transformers with Generalized Augmentation for Identifying Informativeness in COVID-19 Tweets
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Twitter and, in general, social media has become an indispensable communication channel in times of emergency. The ubiquitousness of smartphone gadgets enables people to declare an emergency observed in real-time. As a result, more agencies are interested in programmatically monitoring Twitter (disaster relief organizations and news agencies). Therefore, recognizing the informativeness of a Tweet can help filter noise from the large volumes of Tweets. In this paper, we present our submission for WNUT-2020 Task 2: Identification of informative COVID-19 English Tweets. Our most successful model is an ensemble of transformers, including RoBERTa, XLNet, and BERTweet trained in a Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) setting. The proposed system achieves an F1 score of 0.9011 on the test set (ranking 7th on the leaderboard) and shows significant gains in performance compared to a baseline system using FastText embeddings.
Communication Efficient Distributed Learning with Censored, Quantized, and Generalized Group ADMM
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we propose a communication-efficiently decentralized machine learning framework that solves a consensus optimization problem defined over a network of inter-connected workers. The proposed algorithm, Censored and Quantized Generalized GADMM (CQ-GGADMM), leverages the worker grouping and decentralized learning ideas of Group Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (GADMM), and pushes the frontier in communication efficiency by extending its applicability to generalized network topologies, while incorporating link censoring for negligible updates after quantization. We theoretically prove that CQ-GGADMM achieves the linear convergence rate when the local objective functions are strongly convex under some mild assumptions. Numerical simulations corroborate that CQ-GGADMM exhibits higher communication efficiency in terms of the number of communication rounds and transmit energy consumption without compromising the accuracy and convergence speed, compared to the censored decentralized ADMM, and the worker grouping method of GADMM.
Self-dual codes over $GF(q)$ with symmetric generator matrices
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

We introduce a consistent and efficient method to construct self-dual codes over $GF(q)$ with symmetric generator matrices from a self-dual code over $GF(q)$ of smaller length where $q \equiv 1 \pmod 4$. Using this method, we improve the best-known minimum weights of self-dual codes, which have not significantly improved for almost two decades. We focus on a class of self-dual codes, including double circulant codes. Using our method, called a `symmetric building-up' construction, we obtain many new self-dual codes over $GF(13)$ and $GF(17)$ and improve the bounds of best-known minimum weights of self-dual codes of lengths up to 40. Besides, we compute the minimum weights of quadratic residue codes that were not known before. These are: a [20,10,10] QR self-dual code over $GF(23)$, two [24,12,12] QR self-dual codes over $GF(29)$ and $GF(41)$, and a [32,12,14] QR self-dual codes over $GF(19)$. They have the highest minimum weights so far.
Dirty Road Can Attack: Security of Deep Learning based Automated Lane Centering under Physical-World Attack
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Automated Lane Centering (ALC) systems are convenient and widely deployed today, but also highly security and safety critical. In this work, we are the first to systematically study the security of state-of-the-art deep learning based ALC systems in their designed operational domains under physical-world adversarial attacks. We formulate the problem with a safety-critical attack goal, and a novel and domain-specific attack vector: dirty road patches. To systematically generate the attack, we adopt an optimization-based approach and overcome domain-specific design challenges such as camera frame inter-dependencies due to attack-influenced vehicle control, and the lack of objective function design for lane detection models. We evaluate our attack on a production ALC using 80 scenarios from real-world driving traces. The results show that our attack is highly effective with over 97.5% success rates and less than 0.903 sec average success time, which is substantially lower than the average driver reaction time. This attack is also found (1) robust to various real-world factors such as lighting conditions and view angles, (2) general to different model designs, and (3) stealthy from the driver's view. To understand the safety impacts, we conduct experiments using software-in-the-loop simulation and attack trace injection in a real vehicle. The results show that our attack can cause a 100% collision rate in different scenarios, including when tested with common safety features such as automatic emergency braking. We also evaluate and discuss defenses.
Competing AI: How does competition feedback affect machine learning?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

This papers studies how competition affects machine learning (ML) predictors. As ML becomes more ubiquitous, it is often deployed by companies to compete over customers. For example, digital platforms like Yelp use ML to predict user preference and make recommendations. A service that is more often queried by users, perhaps because it more accurately anticipates user preferences, is also more likely to obtain additional user data (e.g. in the form of a Yelp review). Thus, competing predictors cause feedback loops whereby a predictor's performance impacts what training data it receives and biases its predictions over time. We introduce a flexible model of competing ML predictors that enables both rapid experimentation and theoretical tractability. We show with empirical and mathematical analysis that competition causes predictors to specialize for specific sub-populations at the cost of worse performance over the general population. We further analyze the impact of predictor specialization on the overall prediction quality experienced by users. We show that having too few or too many competing predictors in a market can hurt the overall prediction quality. Our theory is complemented by experiments on several real datasets using popular learning algorithms, such as neural networks and nearest neighbor methods.
MatScIE: An automated tool for the generation of databases of methods and parameters used in the computational materials science literature
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

The number of published articles in the field of materials science is growing rapidly every year. This comparatively unstructured data source, which contains a large amount of information, has a restriction on its re-usability, as the information needed to carry out further calculations using the data in it must be extracted manually. It is very important to obtain valid and contextually correct information from the online (offline) data, as it can be useful not only to generate inputs for further calculations, but also to incorporate them into a querying framework. Retaining this context as a priority, we have developed an automated tool, MatScIE (Material Scince Information Extractor) that can extract relevant information from material science literature and make a structured database that is much easier to use for material simulations. Specifically, we extract the material details, methods, code, parameters, and structure from the various research articles. Finally, we created a web application where users can upload published articles and view/download the information obtained from this tool and can create their own databases for their personal uses.
Decision-based Universal Adversarial Attack
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

A single perturbation can pose the most natural images to be misclassified by classifiers. In black-box setting, current universal adversarial attack methods utilize substitute models to generate the perturbation, then apply the perturbation to the attacked model. However, this transfer often produces inferior results. In this study, we directly work in the black-box setting to generate the universal adversarial perturbation. Besides, we aim to design an adversary generating a single perturbation having texture like stripes based on orthogonal matrix, as the top convolutional layers are sensitive to stripes. To this end, we propose an efficient Decision-based Universal Attack (DUAttack). With few data, the proposed adversary computes the perturbation based solely on the final inferred labels, but good transferability has been realized not only across models but also span different vision tasks. The effectiveness of DUAttack is validated through comparisons with other state-of-the-art attacks. The efficiency of DUAttack is also demonstrated on real world settings including the Microsoft Azure. In addition, several representative defense methods are struggling with DUAttack, indicating the practicability of the proposed method.
RaLL: End-to-end Radar Localization on Lidar Map Using Differentiable Measurement Model
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Compared to the onboard camera and laser scanner, radar sensor provides lighting and weather invariant sensing, which is naturally suitable for long-term localization under adverse conditions. However, radar data is sparse and noisy, resulting in challenges for radar mapping. On the other hand, the most popular available map currently is built by lidar. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework for Radar Localization on Lidar Map (RaLL) to bridge the gap, which not only achieves the robust radar localization but also exploits the mature lidar mapping technique, thus reducing the cost of radar mapping. We first embed both sensor modals into a common feature space by a neural network. Then multiple offsets are added to the map modal for exhaustive similarity evaluation against the current radar modal, yielding the regression of the current pose. Finally, we apply this differentiable measurement model to a Kalman Filter (KF) to learn the whole sequential localization process in an end-to-end manner. \textit{The whole learning system is differentiable with the network based measurement model at the front-end and KF at the back-end.} To validate the feasibility and effectiveness, we employ multi-session multi-scene datasets collected from the real world, and the results demonstrate that our proposed system achieves superior performance over $90km$ driving, even in generalization scenarios where the model training is in UK, while testing in South Korea. We also release the source code publicly.
Video captioning with stacked attention and semantic hard pull
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Video captioning, i.e. the task of generating captions from video sequences creates a bridge between the Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision domains of computer science. The task of generating a semantically accurate description of a video is quite complex. Considering the complexity, of the problem, the results obtained in recent research works are praiseworthy. However, there is plenty of scope for further investigation. This paper addresses this scope and proposes a novel solution. Most video captioning models comprise two sequential/recurrent layers - one as a video-to-context encoder and the other as a context-to-caption decoder. This paper proposes a novel architecture, namely Semantically Sensible Video Captioning (SSVC) which modifies the context generation mechanism by using two novel approaches - "stacked attention" and "spatial hard pull". As there are no exclusive metrics for evaluating video captioning models, we emphasize both quantitative and qualitative analysis of our model. Hence, we have used the BLEU scoring metric for quantitative analysis and have proposed a human evaluation metric for qualitative analysis, namely the Semantic Sensibility (SS) scoring metric. SS Score overcomes the shortcomings of common automated scoring metrics. This paper reports that the use of the aforementioned novelties improves the performance of state-of-the-art architectures.
Hybrid-Attention Guided Network with Multiple Resolution Features for Person Re-Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Extracting effective and discriminative features is very important for addressing the challenging person re-identification (re-ID) task. Prevailing deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) usually use high-level features for identifying pedestrian. However, some essential spatial information resided in low-level features such as shape, texture and color will be lost when learning the high-level features, due to extensive padding and pooling operations in the training stage. In addition, most existing person re-ID methods are mainly based on hand-craft bounding boxes where images are precisely aligned. It is unrealistic in practical applications, since the exploited object detection algorithms often produce inaccurate bounding boxes. This will inevitably degrade the performance of existing algorithms. To address these problems, we put forward a novel person re-ID model that fuses high- and low-level embeddings to reduce the information loss caused in learning high-level features. Then we divide the fused embedding into several parts and reconnect them to obtain the global feature and more significant local features, so as to alleviate the affect caused by the inaccurate bounding boxes. In addition, we also introduce the spatial and channel attention mechanisms in our model, which aims to mine more discriminative features related to the target. Finally, we reconstruct the feature extractor to ensure that our model can obtain more richer and robust features. Extensive experiments display the superiority of our approach compared with existing approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/libraflower/MutipleFeature-for-PRID.
The Dark (and Bright) Side of IoT: Attacks and Countermeasures for Identifying Smart Home Devices and Services
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

We present a new machine learning-based attack that exploits network patterns to detect the presence of smart IoT devices and running services in the WiFi radio spectrum. We perform an extensive measurement campaign of data collection, and we build up a model describing the traffic patterns characterizing three popular IoT smart home devices, i.e., Google Nest Mini, Amazon Echo, and Amazon Echo Dot. We prove that it is possible to detect and identify with overwhelming probability their presence and the services running by the aforementioned devices in a crowded WiFi scenario. This work proves that standard encryption techniques alone are not sufficient to protect the privacy of the end-user, since the network traffic itself exposes the presence of both the device and the associated service. While more work is required to prevent non-trusted third parties to detect and identify the user's devices, we introduce Eclipse, a technique to mitigate these types of attacks, which reshapes the traffic making the identification of the devices and the associated services similar to the random classification baseline.
Collaborative Group Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Collaborative learning has successfully applied knowledge transfer to guide a pool of small student networks towards robust local minima. However, previous approaches typically struggle with drastically aggravated student homogenization when the number of students rises. In this paper, we propose Collaborative Group Learning, an efficient framework that aims to diversify the feature representation and conduct an effective regularization. Intuitively, similar to the human group study mechanism, we induce students to learn and exchange different parts of course knowledge as collaborative groups. First, each student is established by randomly routing on a modular neural network, which facilitates flexible knowledge communication between students due to random levels of representation sharing and branching. Second, to resist the student homogenization, students first compose diverse feature sets by exploiting the inductive bias from sub-sets of training data, and then aggregate and distill different complementary knowledge by imitating a random sub-group of students at each time step. Overall, the above mechanisms are beneficial for maximizing the student population to further improve the model generalization without sacrificing computational efficiency. Empirical evaluations on both image and text tasks indicate that our method significantly outperforms various state-of-the-art collaborative approaches whilst enhancing computational efficiency.
Calibrating Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In the recent years, many methods demonstrated the ability of neural networks to learn depth and pose changes in a sequence of images, using only self-supervision as the training signal. Whilst the networks achieve good performance, the often over-looked detail is that due to the inherent ambiguity of monocular vision they predict depth up to an unknown scaling factor. The scaling factor is then typically obtained from the LiDAR ground truth at test time, which severely limits practical applications of these methods. In this paper, we show that incorporating prior information about the camera configuration and the environment, we can remove the scale ambiguity and predict depth directly, still using the self-supervised formulation and not relying on any additional sensors.
Accelerating Domain Propagation: an Efficient GPU-Parallel Algorithm over Sparse Matrices
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

Fast domain propagation of linear constraints has become a crucial component of today's best algorithms and solvers for mixed integer programming and pseudo-boolean optimization to achieve peak solving performance. Irregularities in the form of dynamic algorithmic behaviour, dependency structures, and sparsity patterns in the input data make efficient implementations of domain propagation on GPUs and, more generally, on parallel architectures challenging. This is one of the main reasons why domain propagation in state-of-the-art solvers is single thread only. In this paper, we present a new algorithm for domain propagation which (a) avoids these problems and allows for an efficient implementation on GPUs, and is (b) capable of running propagation rounds entirely on the GPU, without any need for synchronization or communication with the CPU. We present extensive computational results which demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and show that ample speedups are possible on practically relevant problems: on state-of-the-art GPUs, our geometric mean speed-up for reasonably-large instances is around 10x to 20x and can be as high as 180x on favorably-large instances.
Multiple Exemplars-based Hallucinationfor Face Super-resolution and Editing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Given a really low-resolution input image of a face (say 16x16 or 8x8 pixels), the goal of this paper is to reconstruct a high-resolution version thereof. This, by itself, is an ill-posed problem, as the high-frequency information is missing in the low-resolution input and needs to be hallucinated, based on prior knowledge about the image content. Rather than relying on a generic face prior, in this paper, we explore the use of a set of exemplars, i.e. other high-resolution images of the same person. These guide the neural network as we condition the output on them. Multiple exemplars work better than a single one. To combine the information from multiple exemplars effectively, we introduce a pixel-wise weight generation module. Besides standard face super-resolution, our method allows to perform subtle face editing simply by replacing the exemplars with another set with different facial features. A user study is conducted and shows the super-resolved images can hardly be distinguished from real images on the CelebA dataset. A qualitative comparison indicates our model outperforms methods proposed in the literature on the CelebA and WebFace dataset.